Genesis Bootleg History Overview

This overview brings together all the blogs I have written in my Genesis Bootleg History series over the last five years. The series title itself is a bit ambiguous, I realised. For clarity, it is not a history of Genesis bootlegs. Rather, it is a stab at telling the story of Genesis – in the studio as well as onstage – through widely available bootlegs of some of the band’s live performances. Anyway, here’s some background to start us off…

Seconds Out – The Greatest Live Album? What idiot gave such a ridiculous title to a blog about Genesis’s 1977 live double album? Errr…I did.

And why is it ridiculous?

Well, first, there is the adage that the answer to any headline (or in this case, blog) with a question mark in the title is almost always ‘no’.

And second – and far more important – who am I to pontificate about the greatness or otherwise of this or that live album? Who gives a shit what I think?

Yes, I am entitled to my opinion but, like everybody else, all I can possibly do is make judgements based on the live albums that I am familiar with. And to be honest, the list isn’t all that long. And that’s before we even start to unpick the whole knotty problem of what criteria we should use to assess ‘greatness’ when it comes to live albums.

(In my defence, I was overly influenced at the time I wrote that blog by SEO – search engine optimisation – which is basically about ways to get as many people as possible to click on your website. ‘Clickbait’ is another word for it.)

But writing the Seconds Out appreciation did lead directly to this Genesis Bootleg History blog series. I had been building up my bootleg collection over the years and so I was aware that – for all its brilliance – Seconds Out was presenting us with a rather misleading picture of the 1977 Wind and Wuthering tour.

And I am not referring to the tinkering – the fixes and overdubs and such like – that goes on in the studio afterwards. There were two even more basic issues with Seconds Out, I thought (and still do).

First, the music that was left out. Seconds Out omits all except one (Afterglow) of the songs they played from the Wind and Wuthering album. It also includes The Cinema Show, which was played (and recorded) on the A Trick of the Tail tour but then dropped.

Second, the chat that was cut out. It did not include any of the between-song nonsense that was such an integral part of the Genesis live experience. For example, side three of the original vinyl album opens with the words “supper’s ready” to introduce, well, Supper’s Ready. But what we miss out on is the whole story of Romeo and Juliet getting frisky at the drive-in. And if you hadn’t heard some bootlegs from the 1976–77 tours you wouldn’t have a clue who Harry is…

It is worth making the point, by the way, that the Three Sides Live album is arguably even more misleading about the Abacab tour.

So writing the Seconds Out blog – which is partly an appreciation of the album itself and partly an analysis of the album in the context of the Wind and Wuthering tour as a whole – sparked the idea of sketching out the history of Genesis via some of their bootlegs.

Bootlegs. A quick word about them.

They are essential listening for devotees of a band, offering a rawer, less polished and therefore more authentic picture of a live performance. Whether it is an audience recording, a soundboard recording or a live radio broadcast, we get to hear the rough edges, the mistakes, the miscues – in short, the stuff that gets smoothed over in (or chopped out of) any official release.

One moment captures the magic of bootlegs for me. It is from the Dijon 1978 show. Phil’s slightly off-kilter wail near the end of Afterglow, surely never to see the official light of day, is somehow perfect.

Some bootlegs are of course more listenable than others. All bootleg rating systems will have a ‘For collectors only’ category. As it happens, I get the impression that Genesis fans are luckier than most in terms of the number of high-quality bootlegs available.

That said, when I started this series I didn’t have a complete show from the Nursery Cryme era and I had never really bothered with the Foxtrot tour because of the existence of Genesis Live. (NB It is quite easy to find a version of Supper’s Ready from Leicester De Montfort Hall in February 1973 that was apparently included on test pressings of Genesis Live but left off the official release. Needless to say, it is great.)

And so my starting-point was Montreal in 1974 on the Selling England by the Pound tour. This bootleg stands out for two reasons in particular: Peter Gabriel’s French and the inclusion of The Battle of Epping Forest, which wasn’t one of the live tracks from the October 1973 London Rainbow show featured on the Genesis Archive 1967–75 box set (though you can find it easily enough online).

The Montreal 1974 blog established a template that I ended up using for the entire blog series: begin with some musical/band context, move on to discussing the then-current album and finish with an analysis of the live show, as documented by the bootleg.

(I have rewritten the original Seconds Out blog, focusing on the Dallas show of 19 March 1977, to fit this template. Dallas 1977: Genesis Bootlegs appears in the correct place chronologically. See below.)

I neglected the Lamb tour as well, partly because the entire set – with the exception of the encores – was made up of the Lamb album, and partly because the Genesis Archive 1967–75 box set includes a more or less complete show from the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium in January 1975. I wasn’t aware until later how much polishing had been done in the studio before its release, particularly by Peter and Steve, so it is a tour that I will revisit at some point.

Anyway, I jumped directly from 1974 to the A Trick of the Tail tour in 1976, the first with Phil on lead vocals. It will be obvious if you read the blogs that I am much more a fan of 70s Genesis than anything that comes later, and I think the four tours between 1976 and 1980 are exceptional.

The Duke blog actually opens with the words: “Genesis, 1980 — and this time it’s personal.” Duke was the first album released when I was actually a fan of the band. As I go on to say in the blog, the lead-off single Turn It On Again and indeed the album as a whole felt at the time like a hugely unwelcome change of direction.

It was on the …And Then There Were Three… tour that Phil started to use the ‘new songs, old songs’ line that he continued with – with varying degrees of weariness and resignation – right through to the final tour in 1992. The medley was first introduced, in embryonic form, on the Duke tour. For better or worse, it became their way of acknowledging and accommodating the two very different eras of Genesis.

Something that I scratch my head about in the 1992 blog is whether we actually need bootlegs of the later tours. It is horses for courses, I guess. Bootlegs will always have value for hardcore fans – see my earlier comments about miscues and out-of-tune wails.

But – to repeat another point – if you are drawn to bootlegs mainly to hear what was omitted from official releases, it is at least debatable whether bootlegs are telling us much that we can’t glean from the CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays that followed on from those later-era tours.

Bear in mind that the final track (it.) from the aforementioned Lamb recording from the LA Shrine Auditorium in 1975 was missed, as were the encores, because the tape ran out. That wouldn’t have happened in 1992 or even in 1987. (The Wembley shows were apparently the first concerts ever recorded in HD. The ensuing video release lasts 132 minutes and features the entire concert, with the exception of the main In the Cage medley.)

[The plot thickens! Not more than two hours after I uploaded this blog, I read that a fiftieth anniversary box set of the Lamb album is coming out in 2025. It includes the previously released Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium recording – plus, so the publicity blurb claims, the missing final track and both encores. Well well well! Let’s see what we actually get!]

I ended the series with the We Can’t Dance tour of 1992, after which Phil left the band. After years of all but ignoring the 1997 Calling All Stations album (with Ray Wilson on vocals), I gave it a few plays not too long ago and actually quite liked it. (See my blog Calling All Stations: Not the Worst Genesis Album). But when I watched a video of the 1998 show at Katowice in Poland, it seemed so radically different from a traditional Genesis concert that I decided not to include it in this series.

I also decided against including the two reunion tours. I did think that one or two set list choices for the 2007 Turn It On Again tour were noteworthy, specifically the inclusion of Ripples and the exclusion of Abacab. Both decisions, in my view, to be applauded.

Using Carpet Crawlers as the second and final encore was also unexpected. I would have included it in the main set instead of Hold on My Heart and chosen another bona fide classic to end with. The Knife, maybe! Now that would have been fun!

On the other hand, it was disappointing (if not entirely unexpected) to see them lean so heavily on the Invisible Touch album in the latter part of the set – Throwing It All Away, Domino, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and Invisible Touch. To be fair, they resurrected Los Endos, but see the blog about the 1992 tour for my thoughts on the song I Can’t Dance, which was the first encore. Here’s a clue: ugh.

And I thought long and hard about whether to get a ticket to see the Last Domino? tour – with Phil in a chair, his son on drums and two other non-Genesis musicians on stage as well as Mike, Tony and Daryl. I decided against.

I should say that (as will also be obvious if you read the blogs) I don’t have a musical background and claim no insider knowledge of the band. Nor have I listened to a particularly large number of Genesis bootlegs. I am just a longtime Genesis fan.

The bits of history I include in the blogs come from the obvious places. Armando Gallo’s book I Know What I Like gave me an excellent grounding in Genesis history when I first started listening to them at the end of the 70s. I have read the autobiographies written by Mike and Phil in the last few years, so some of the later blogs include quotes from those books. I only read Steve’s autobiography after I had written the blogs for the earlier tours. Most of the facts and figures (chart positions, touring revenues etc) come from Wikipedia.

My go-to website for tour dates and general bootleg information has been: https://www.genesis-movement.org

The homepage hasn’t been updated for a long time so I don’t know if it is still an active website, but the live database is excellent.

One last thought. There are several shows where Phil announces that they are recording (Hammersmith Odeon 1976 and Dallas 1977, to name but two). I am baffled why they have not yet put these out officially, or at least released a complete and unexpurgated version of Seconds Out, using the recordings from Paris, like Led Zeppelin did with the Madison Square Garden tapes from 1973 when they re-released The Song Remains the Same.

And finally, it would be impossible to highlight favourite songs or even favourite moments – there are far, far too many – but here are a few highlights (and lowlights)…

Tour:
1977; 1976 a close second

Bootleg:
Hammersmith 1976; Dallas or Zurich 1977; London 1980

Better tour than I expected:
1978 – the first without Steve

Best opening song:
Watcher of the Skies; Deep in the Motherlode; Behind the Lines

Biggest song choice surprise:
White Mountain brought back for the 1976 tour
Fountain of Salmacis brought back for the 1978 tour
Supper’s Ready brought back for the 1982 tour

Unexpected delight:
The Duke suite (particularly Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End) from the Duke tour

Worst moment:
Who Dunnit? from the Abacab and Mama tours

Biggest let-down:
I Can’t Dance closing the main set in 1992
Conversation Between Two Stools

Studio album:
Selling England by the Pound; Wind and Wuthering

Official live album:
Seconds Out; honourable mention for Genesis Live

Worst official live album:
The Way We Walk – The Shorts
The Way We Walk – The Longs